


Places We Don't Belong

by easternepiphany



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-15
Updated: 2014-02-15
Packaged: 2018-01-12 12:47:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1186372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/easternepiphany/pseuds/easternepiphany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The kind of love affair/Which every respectable building must keep as a legend</p>
            </blockquote>





	Places We Don't Belong

**Author's Note:**

> An earlier version of this story appeared [here](http://comm-ficathon.livejournal.com/592.html?thread=28752#t28752).
> 
> Thank you, as usual and as always, to Libby for the support and encouragement and for being my first and favorite reader.

Lunch is a veggie burger with extra pickles (her) and a chef’s salad minus the eggs, dressing on the side (him), in a diner fifty miles outside of Albuquerque. He makes fun of her for getting fries instead of a side salad, but he eats half of them anyway and she lets him, only raising an eyebrow as he maybe scoops up some dressing with a particularly mushy one.

The New Mexico desert is beautiful, reds and browns and oranges, and she takes pictures of everything and sends them back home to their awaiting friends. Yesterday they went hiking in the Sandia Mountains, made it to the top of the trail, and celebrated by making out against a tree, slick with sweat. They were caught by a family of four, two parents and a son and a daughter, all who looked on in horror. The mother asked, in a stern and angry voice, weren’t they a little old for such antics.

“Probably,” he said with a shrug and she bit her lip to keep from laughing.

When they get back in the RV after lunch, he drives toward the highway and she gets out the old atlas she’s been dragging around. There’s no point of that, he tells her almost every day, because their phones have GPS and also, duh, Google is a thing. But she likes it, the old fashioned-ness of it, the feel of the paper beneath her fingertips.

“I’m tired of the southwest,” she says, flipping pages.

“Okay. Where do you want to go?”

“Alaska,” she answers instantly. “I want to see the Northern Lights.”

“Do you want to stop at home on the way there? See everyone?”

She turns to him and smiles. “Yeah.”

 

 

It happened like this: Jeff bought a lottery ticket one day on an impulse. He was grabbing a cup of coffee at a gas station on his way to work, and the clerk behind the counter pointed at the sign. “Ninety million. Lowest it’s been for a while so the odds aren’t so out there.” Jeff shrugged and tore another dollar from his wallet. Three days later he was a millionaire.

He showed up to Britta’s office at lunchtime, jittery, and slid into the chair in front of her desk. “I’ve thought a lot about this.”

“What do you mean? It’s been like twelve hours.”

“I’m going to quit my job. I’m going to buy an RV. And I’m going to go. And I want you to come with me.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere. Everywhere.”

“Why?”

He rolled his eyes, exasperated. “Because I’m in love with you, you dummy.”

 

 

“Is this, like, a mental breakdown kind of thing?” Britta asked as she watched Jeff throw clothes into a duffel bag.

“No. And what are you even doing here when you have an entire apartment to pack up?”

Around her, the room was divided into neat piles and boxes, ready for a storage unit outside of town. He could afford to pay for the storage unit for months, years, decades. Until after he died and one of them—maybe Troy, maybe Abed, most likely Annie—went to sift through his DVD collection and his pile of hand weights. It was weird to see his obsessively-clean apartment in shambles.

“I’m trying to decide what this whole thing is and if you’re going to change your mind before I put in the effort,” she said.

He looked up, took a deep breath, and pursed his lips. “I’ve left the state twice in my life. One was when I was six and my parents took me on a family vacation to San Diego and they argued the entire time. Two was when I went to a business retreat with my old firm in Orlando. And now I have more money that I’ll ever be able to spend and I want to go and see all the things I spent my entire life missing. And I’d like to have you come with me because it would be nice to have someone to talk to and ever since I met you you’ve been so quick to spout the benefits of seeing the entire world and also you’re very good in bed. But you don’t have to come if you don’t want to. You can say no. And I’ll say goodbye and I’ll mail you a postcard. I’m going.”

He turned back to his stack of shirts and held one up as if examining to see if it was worthy of the trip.

“What about our mail?” she asked, voice small.

“The only bills we’ll have are our cell phones—and I already told you I’d put you on my plan—and the RV insurance and I switched to paperless billing.”

“But what if—”

“I’ll get a PO box and give Annie and Shirley each a key and they can check it every once in a while. Haven’t you done this whole run away from home and live on the road thing before?”

“Not since I became, you know, a grown-up.” She leaned in to wrap a hand around his wrist. “So I’m good in bed, huh?”

He shrugged, a smirk on his face. “You’re okay.”

 

 

They waste forty-five days in Mexico, in a tiny village on the west coast. They spend days in the sand and their skin becomes golden brown. She gets freckles on her legs and arms and across the bridge of her nose and one night, drunk on tequila, he tries to count them all, sappy and slurring.

They drink strong, black coffee and eat mangoes and guava and soups and enchiladas and sweet bread until their clothes are tight. He looks at the stretching fabric with horror and immediately digs running sneakers (two pair—she had protested heartily but he bought them for her when she wasn’t looking) out from the depths of the RV. They run along the beach in the mornings, up at dawn and done by breakfast time. She pants and struggles to keep up with him, but she does, and her lengthy post-run tirades get shorter and shorter each day.

She thinks maybe they can stay here forever, beneath the sun, playing soccer with laughing kids, splashing each other with the Pacific. At night they play poker while drinking beer outside where they can see all the stars. It’s something out of a movie. It’s one of those stretches where he’s happier than she’s ever seen him; sometimes it scares her how light and free he can be. She tracks his mood across the continent—he’s always happiest when they’re at their simplest.

According to Buddhism (real Buddhism, not Pierce’s cult-y version) the origin of suffering is desire, but everything they desire is right here, so how could they ever suffer? She goes to sleep beside him each night and wakes up in the same spot each morning and she wants for nothing. He looks at her sometimes, now, in the glare of the Mexican sun—the sun, the same thing from so many different angles, yet different at each latitude—with different eyes, eyes that love her in a whole, consuming way. Happy eyes. She’s never known him to be happy.

One morning he doesn’t wake her up to go running. They lay in the too-small RV bed silently. Then he turns to her, tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. “Ready?”

She smiles and nods. They get dressed, start the ignition, and move on.

 

 

“Come on, admit it,” Jeff said as he bounded up the steps. “This is nicer inside than your apartment.”

Britta rolled her eyes. “I feel like we’re going on a church mission or something.”

She looked out the window where the salesman stood hopefully, pretending not to stare as they explored the RV. He was kind of smarmy and sketchy with a greasy mustache; Britta thought maybe he knew who Jeff was and knew there were eight figures in his bank account.

“When you get us pulled over for speeding, that’s what we can tell the cop.”

“Can you even condense your stuff down to fit in here?” Britta asked. “You have a lot of skin products.”

“Yeah, well, you have a lot of boots.”

“Okay,” Britta said, plopping down on the bed (maybe a queen _at most_ , but, like, a Super 8 Motel queen, that’s just a too-big full: Jeff’s feet would definitely hang off the edge), “but once upon a time I lived off one pair of Converse and four shirts and three pairs of underwear. By the way, have you ever washed your clothes in a dirty river? Because it’s a skill you should pick up. The key is to avoid the algae as best as possible.”

He pointed to a closed door. “There’s a washer-dryer behind there, you know.”

“Oh.”

“Your life before you met me was gross.”

“Yes, because _you_ were the main factor in my having clean clothes, not the washer in the basement of my building with the broken coin slot.”

“You tell yourself that. I know the truth.”

He smiled, and it took Britta aback. It was weird to see Jeff smile so much, the way he’d been doing lately. It was like there was something that had been bothering him for his whole life, and now with this money and this decision to leave everything behind, whatever it was was now gone. It was going to take some getting used to, to not have to deal with a Jeff who was always moody on Wednesdays, who got grumpy if there wasn’t fat-free vanilla coffee creamer in the fridge or clean sheets on the bed on Sunday mornings.

“So. What do you think? It’ll do, right? Enough room for both of us. How’s the bed?”

Britta shrugged. “It’s okay.”

He sat down next to her, hip to hip. “Wanna test it out?”

“If that creep wasn’t probably peeking in through the window, definitely. But I already saw him undressing me in his mind, he doesn’t need the full show.”

“Come _on_.” His hand began to creep up her leg and she couldn’t help but laugh. This was another thing she was struggling to get used to: a Jeff who was… _physically affectionate_. He held her hand in the grocery store a few days before and she’d froze up because it was just weird. Jeff Winger didn’t hold hands or burst into offices and announce he was in love with you. Jeff Winger stopped answering your phone calls and then showed up at midnight a few days later for sex.

“You’re definitely buying this, right? We’re not going to condemn some poor Mormon church group to sleep in a bed filled with our sex germs?”

“Sex germs? Is there something you need to tell me?”

“Stop talking and hurry up because I’m pretty sure I saw that salesman on a sex offender list and he’s _not_ going to leave us alone for much longer.”

 

 

There’s a bar, somewhere so deep in Texas they’re not even sure where they are (“Texas? A state so red it’s hot to the touch? We can’t go there!”) and they stop for beer and a night out. There’s a jukebox and dim lights and everyone is wearing honest-to-god cowboy boots and wide belt buckles and ten-gallon hats. They stick out like the sorest of thumbs but he tugs her to a corner table and orders them two beers—bottle, because no one in the place is drinking draught.

A pool table sits in the middle of the room, next to a dance floor where people are spinning and twirling. A song about redneck girls blares from the jukebox and as condescending as she’d like to be about the place, everyone looks like they’re having fun. It’s something she’s noticed, these last few years: the people who look the dumbest always have the best time. But it’s a lesson she hasn’t been able to apply to herself; something about old dogs and new tricks.

The song changes to some old ballad she remembers hearing from the scratchy speakers of a turntable, maybe George Jones, all slow fiddles and twangy, sad guitar. “Dance with me,” he says, kicking her under the table.

“You’re a terrible dancer.”

“You can make fun of me.”

They have somewhat of an audience as they move to the dance floor. He gathers her up in his arms and they sway. It’s a slow side-to-side, nothing too elaborate or elegant, and she laughs, tucked under his chin.

“What’s so funny?”

But he knows, because she’s wearing a leather jacket and he’s wearing jeans that cost three figures and they don’t belong. It’s like: this entire time, somewhere deep down, they’ve been searching for this one, perfect place that will never exist, a place where they can belong totally and fully. They’ve looked for it in laundromats in Pittsburgh and grocery stores in Tacoma, in late-night pizzerias in Manhattan and farmer’s markets in Des Moines. They don’t belong here, either, surprise surprise; and they’ll never say it but they’ll get back in the RV at the end of the night, bellies full of cheap but cold beer, and they’ll tuck into bed and check this bar off their ever-growing mental list: _Places We Don’t Belong_. Maybe, she thinks, as he leads them—weight on left leg, weight on right, repeat, repeat—people don’t belong to places, maybe people belong to other people.

 

 

Rumors that circulate about Jeff Winger and Britta Perry (a list compiled and sent via email by Abed Nadir):

  * Mid-life crises of the worst kind
  * On the run from the law
  * Lottery tax evasion
  * Shipped off to insane asylums



The truth (a mental list compiled but never sent by Britta Perry):

  * Sometimes they sleep under the stars in plushy sleeping bags (camping is a lot more fun when there’s a bed and a toilet ten feet away if you need it), beneath canopies of green trees that look black in the dark. There are so many stars, cliché as it may be to say, and Britta tries to remember names and formations of constellations. Jeff’s mouth on her skin makes her forget.
  * Most days she feels like she’s twenty again: the open road and endless possibilities in front of her. She says this out loud and he smirks and calls her sappy, but she knows he feels it, too.
  * There are long stretches of silence on long stretches of highway but it’s never uncomfortable. If Britta’s not driving she reads books and emails her friends and keeps an Instagram account of things they’ve seen. If Jeff’s not driving he plays Bejeweled and flips through the radio, around and around, static and talk and songs.
  * There are things they learn about each other Britta is certain they would never know within the bubble of Greendale. Getting to know Jeff Winger, she thinks, is a never-ending sea of tangled knots and lines and sometimes he says things that simultaneously break her heart and sew it back together. She, in return, tells him things she’s never told anyone; silly things like: I did ballet for five years and it was all taut muscles and perfect form and I could have been good, real good, but I quit to be a brat to my mother; serious things like: it was my eleventh birthday and no one believed me. She files all these things away—the things she now knows about him, the things he now knows about her—and before long she realizes that this is what it means to share your life with someone.
  * Abed emails an official-looking piece of paper, which they print, sign, and scan at a Staples outside Minneapolis. “It says that I can make a film based off your lives and you won’t sue me,” he writes. “Although I’m probably going to include the insane asylum.”



 

 

In the weeks leading up to their departure, Britta spent most of her time throwing questions at Jeff. If they weren’t together, she was calling or texting him, trying to get some semblance of where his mind was. Two and a half weeks before the day they planned to leave, she still hadn’t quit her job. She called him on her way home from work, the speakerphone filling up her car with his voice.

“Are you sure something didn’t happen?”

“Did you give your notice yet?” he asked in return.

“No. Now tell me, did something happen?”

“Are you home?”

“Just pulling in, why?”

“I’m a block away, I’ll be right there.”

She waited for him at the kitchen table. When he got there, he kissed her hello and sat across from her, looking at her in that expectant but humored way he had taken up lately.

“Listen, Jeff,” she started, “you know I want to do this. But I’m… worried, I guess, about you. You’re the third most neurotic person I know and you’re just willing to quit a job you worked really hard to get and leave your entire fancy lawyer life behind to drive around in a camper.”

Jeff paused, looking almost offended at being third most anything in her life.

“Annie and my mother,” she supplied, to which he shrugged and nodded, seemingly satisfied with the list.

“Okay, first of all, it’s not a camper. There’s a bedroom and a shower. Second of all. Do you think that maybe me getting disbarred and then having to really search for a job was a sign from the universe that this wasn’t supposed to be?”

“You don’t believe in signs from the universe!” Britta exclaimed. “Okay, now I know something is wrong. Do you need me to therapize you?”

“Absolutely not,” he said, laughing. “Now, are you going to quit your job or what?”

She took a deep breath and said it in a rush: “I’mworriedthatI’mgoingtobesomesortofkeptwoman.”

“Ah. Okay. Well, I can’t really do anything about that except tell you that you won’t be, that I’m asking you to come with me because I want you there, and that yes, I will be financially taking care of you, but that doesn’t mean anything because this money was handed to me. I didn’t earn it. This isn’t you quitting your job to sit on the couch and cook me dinner after I come home from a long day of work. This is me becoming stupidly wealthy through no merit of my own—on accident, really—and inviting you to share it with me. So. Please. Quit your job tomorrow and pack your shit and let’s go. Please come with me.”

 

 

They visit home at least once a year, usually at Thanksgiving or Christmas. It starts off as a spoken agreement, a plan—”We’re a day outside of Colorado, you wanna stop by and see everyone?”—but then it keeps happening year after year. Wherever they may be, on November first, without even discussing it, they always start toward Greendale.

Shirley enjoys fawning over them; they always stay at her house, in her immaculately clean guest room, where she feeds them homemade meals and not-so-subtly asks them if they’re ready to settle down, maybe get married, maybe have some kids (“It’s never too late!”). Troy, Annie, and Abed listen intently to stories of places far away; they bring up pictures they’ve been sent and ask questions and plan vacations of their own (“We can meet you in Chicago for a long weekend!”). Pierce likes to hint at offering his company if they ever need a third person, but Annie is always quick to catch on and tactfully steer him in a different direction (“But Pierce! We need you here instead!”).

And it’s not one-sided: they listen to the details of everyone’s lives, of Shirley’s business and her family, of Annie’s job and her boyfriend, of Abed’s films, of Troy’s students, of Pierce’s new venture as an investor in small businesses. They get tours of new apartments and sandwich shops, they look through pictures and watch home videos, they take restaurant recommendations and visit new stores. They immerse themselves in their old lives, which have somehow continued without them.

It’s not an easy adjustment, though. Things like Andre’s alarm through the thin walls and the abundance of _space_ in Shirley’s house begin to freak them out. They lived like this, once, like normal people. They stayed in one place, went to work every day. It’s bizarre, it’s unreal.

“Do you miss it?” she asks him in the morning. They can hear the shower start somewhere in the house, maybe Shirley or Andre getting ready for work (Elijah and Jordan and Ben, on break from school, rarely wake up early unless there’s something fun to do).

“Sometimes,” he says. “Sometimes I think of just coming back and buying a big house where we can live, and going back to work, and being able to see them whenever we want.”

“But?”

“But I like our life.”

“Me, too,” she says. She likes the way it’s _theirs_ , that every different life they could be living belongs to both of them together.

They always leave right after New Year’s, after champagne and party hats. It’s always bittersweet to say goodbye to all of them (“Pierce looks old. Do you think he looks old?” “Please, Pierce is going to outlive all of us. Don’t worry about it. But I can remind him to go to the doctor, if it’ll make you feel better.”) but they do; they get back on the road and pick a direction.

 

 

It was when they got on the road, finally, that Britta started to relax. It was like: when Britta dropped out of high school, she was sixteen and had about two hundred dollars to her name, she had nowhere to go and nothing to do, and no guarantee that she’d have a meal to eat or a place to sleep the next day. But it didn’t matter because there was this freedom, this lightness of having nothing in front of you and everything behind you. The lull of a twelve-month lease and a paycheck every two weeks and a freezer full of vegan pizzas made her forget.

But after her apartment was empty and their goodbyes were said, Britta felt that weight gone. And suddenly, she realized that this was going to be a good life. Ten, fifteen miles from home, and it was already completely different, and she was annoyed that she hadn’t realized it sooner, or—at least—realized it before Jeff had.

On the road, there were no games. There was nobody to impress. She loved Jeff and could love him without the watchful eyes of five other people. She could relax, almost, because there was no running away anymore; she’d already run as far as she could go. How had he known this whole time, that the key to being happy was to be together without any pretense or worry about what others thought or stupid petty _drama_ , the kind that had plagued the two of them for so long? How had he known that the only way for them to commit to each other was to completely and totally eradicate every single commitment from their lives?

All or nothing, she guessed. The only way she knew to do things and not fuck them up.

“Any place in particular you want to go first?” he asked as they navigated their way to the city limits.

“Not really.” She slipped her shoes off and tucked her feet beneath her. She was already, somehow, more comfortable than she’d been in years, maybe.

“Do you mind if…?” he trailed off and then took an embarrassed-sounding breath. “I’ve never seen the ocean.”

She smiled, wide and bright. There was a giddiness that made her almost lightheaded. “Well, what are you waiting for? Atlantic or Pacific?”

“What do you recommend?”

“Hmmm,” she said, pretending to think about it. “Pacific, I think, for your first time. We can go over and then up and back that way. Or down. Or whatever.”

“Or whatever,” he said. His smile matched hers, goofy and manic, as if they were both drunk. She’d never tell him, but he’d been right the whole time.

 

 

Britta didn’t mention his declaration of love (his first; typical Winger) until they had crossed the Colorado border. “What did you mean,” she asked carefully, “when you said you were in love with me?” She was behind the wheel, checking the mirrors every few minutes; she still wasn’t used to driving something so big.

“Pretty self-explanatory,” he said.

She graduated two semesters after he did; he took her to dinner to celebrate and she didn’t realize until his hand was on her knee that it might have been something of a date. He kissed her goodnight almost awkwardly and she couldn’t help but laugh at him as he started to walk back to his car. “You can come in,” she called. “If you want.”

There was never a discussion, but there almost didn’t need to be. It was what it was between the two of them, messy and undefined and slow. Britta liked it that way.

“When did that happen?”

He shrugged. “Like a hundred years ago. What’s the big deal?”

She smiled to herself and shook her head. “No big deal. You know—”

“Yup.”

“Okay.”

 

 

The RV breaks down somewhere outside of Lexington, Kentucky. There’s a rattling noise and then a bit of smoke and that’s that. It’s his turn to drive, and he manages to pull off to the side of the highway before it completely gives up. They get out and open the hood, although neither of them have any earthly clue what they’re looking for. It’s hot and humid and her hair is sticking to the back of her neck. She can’t find a hair tie or a rubber band or _anything_ so she pins it back with a chip clip stolen off a bag of Doritos. He laughs at her and she’s too sticky and aggravated and tired to laugh back. She yells instead.

They’re still yelling at each other when the tow truck arrives—I should have never come with you, I should have never invited you to come—but as they ride in the broken RV to the repair shop, they have nothing left to say to each other.

It’s a long trip; twenty, thirty minutes go by in silence. Her arms are crossed over her chest and she sighs loudly. “What even are we?”

“Uh. Humans? People? Being towed by a guy who might murder us?”

“No, I mean,” she unclenches, just a little, and takes the chip clip out of her hair, “okay, say that tow truck driver does want to murder us. He murders you and then somehow I manage to knock him out with a wrench or something, and I call the police and say ‘this crazy guy killed my...’ My what?”

They’re sitting on the little sofa, side by side but with a wealth of space between them. He looks at her incredulously. “You’re asking me to define our relationship with a hypothetical about me being brutally murdered? Really?”

She shrugs.

“What would you say if I asked you?”

“I asked you first.”

“Christ, Britta. You’re not some girl I’m dating. You’re not my buddy. If you haven’t realized how I feel about you by now then I’m doing something extremely wrong.”

“I love you,” she says, and she’s never said it because the first and only time she tried he cut her off. Those times before, long ago, have been erased by time and by growing up. They’ve been doing this for eight months now, floating around, trying on different places like hats, and somehow she loves him more, trapped in a vehicle with him all day every day.

“So then you understand that I can’t call you my _girlfriend_ because it doesn’t mean anything. That word is so small and it doesn’t—”

“It doesn’t,” she interrupts, agreeing. “Sorry I brought it up.”

The tow truck pulls them into the parking lot of a run-down auto body shop. They pause to look out the window. The RV comes to a stop and he stands up. “Don’t be sorry.” He holds out a hand and she takes it. He kisses her in the twenty seconds it takes for the driver to hop out of his truck.

It takes three days for the RV to be fixed, three days in a cheap motel room with rough sheets and thin walls. “You’re everything,” he says in between the second and third day. It’s the middle of the night and she’d been a few inches from sleep.

“Huh?”

“That’s what I would say you are. I only have two things anymore: the RV and you. And the RV won’t put out, so. It’s just you. You’re everything.”

She feels her mouth stretch into a grin in the dark and she rolls over to touch his face. “You’re such a sap.”

“Don’t tell the RV. It’s already mad at me.”

She laughs and kisses him and they’re on the road again by the next night.

 

 

It’s raining on Fifth Avenue and the crowd crosses Forty-Fourth Street in one big, umbrellaed mass. It’s the loud kind of rain, the kind that echoes off the sidewalk and the awnings of all the buildings. Every once in a while, a siren sounds and a firetruck or police car or ambulance flies by, splashing puddles onto the sidewalk in its wake.

Britta tugs on Jeff’s sleeve and they duck into a Starbucks. He closes the umbrella and points to an empty table in the corner.

“You wanna grab that table and I’ll order? You want tea?”

“Sure.” Britta weaves through the crowd and brushes wet hair out of her eyes. The line is long and occupies herself by checking her phone: an email from Pierce, a picture message from Abed. She’s typing her replies when Jeff gets back.

“Can’t we take a cab or something?”

She _tut_ s and takes the lid off her cup, swirling the tea bag around. “No, we can’t take a _cab_. Cabs are for tourists and rich douches who can’t brave the rain.”

“Hate to tell you, kitten,” Jeff says, “but you’re a tourist and a rich douche now, no matter how long you may have lived in New York.”

They left the RV in Jersey and took the PATH train into the city, which Britta futilely pointed out is only for suburban moms taking their kids to see matinees of _Annie_. But she flat-out refuses to get into a cab and New York passes by in a daze of pushing onto crowded subway cars and ducking through rainy April days. She takes him to her favorite places, the places she’d spend most of her twenties, but this is not the same New York she’d known back then. Maybe she’s different in that important growing-up sort of way, but it unnerves her a bit when Jeff wants to take her to dinner in restaurants she’s never been able to afford to _look_ at, let alone order wine from.

Though Jeff has a surprisingly touristy view of New York, Britta tries her hardest to keep him out of Midtown, regaled to Brooklyn and the Village and teeny tiny karaoke bars where, three vodkas in, she pretends to go to the bathroom and signs them up to sing “I Got You, Babe.”

“I know it’s not Seal with Dean Pelton,” she slurs as she tugs on his hand to pull him onstage, “but it’s me, you, Sonny, and Cher, so let’s go, Winger.”

They’re not terrible but they’re not that good, either, so when they step off the stage it’s to a smattering of polite applause. Jeff quickly orders two shots and he pulls Britta into a corner booth for the rest of the night; she’s pretty sure it’s so that she doesn’t drag him up for an encore.

Three weeks of subway cars and museums and thinly-veiled Long Island accents and thin-crust pizza

(“You have to fold it like this, then let some of the grease drip onto your plate, and then you eat it kind of like a pita.”

“That’s really stupid.”

“Shh! Don’t say that too loud! Just eat and shut up!”)

they get back on the ferry to New Jersey and Britta watches the Manhattan skyline across the East River.

“So?” she asks. “What did you think?”

Jeff shrugs. “I liked it. Not enough to live there. But it was fun to visit.”

Once upon a time, Britta ran home to Colorado with every intention of going back to New York City, of living in a teeny tiny studio above a taqueria and trudging down sidewalks in all sorts of weather. When Greendale felt suffocating, it was always there in the back of her mind: _one day, one day, one day_. She never could have loved a man who didn’t also love New York.

“We’ll come back,” Jeff says as Jersey grows closer and closer and Britta smiles.

 

 

They cross the border into Alaska a day before her fortieth birthday and he buys her a Hostess cupcake and sticks a candle in it. “Welcome to the end,” he says jokingly, laugh lines prominent against his eyes. It’s the end of a lot of things: the end of the continent, the end of her supposed youth, the end of this long stretch of Canadian tundra. She breaks the cupcake in half and shoves part of it into his face, like they do at weddings. They’ll never get married.

They sit on the bumper of the RV all night and watch the sky, purple and blue and green. She rests her head on his shoulder and she inhales and exhales the cold air. He wraps his arm around her and they share body heat.

“Pretty,” he remarks every so often, the same compliment to the sky over and over again.

“Yeah,” she agrees.

 

 

They’re old when it stops. The RV has been replaced twice now, incidentals dropped off at the storage unit once a year; it’s a labyrinth of souvenirs, things one of them just _had_ to have and the other yelled about, and when Britta tripped over a miniature statue of a cat riding a surfboard and cut her elbow to the point of five stitches, Jeff started calling in reinforcements to help move the stuff around. Reinforcements: Shirley’s kids and grandkids, Annie’s son and daughter.

Jeff can’t drive at night anymore and Britta gets too sleepy to take that shift every time. But it’s only after three near-accidents and Annie calling them to yell at least ten times do they give up. They buy a house in Greendale, a small house, big enough for them and their things. It takes a while for them to get used to it: the stillness, the quiet, waking up in the same place day after day.

Britta’s knees creak when she rolls out of bed in the morning. Sometimes it rains—torrentially, terribly—and Britta’s legs ache and she takes advantage of the overly-large bathtub: the one amenity she’d missed the most all those years on the road.

“Don’t slip and fall, Grandma,” Jeff teases her when she pads across the house in her bathrobe, a bottle of bubble bath tucked in the crook of her arm. But more times than not he shows up in the bathroom halfway through, putzing around until she rolls her eyes and asks if he’d like to join her.

He always agrees and gets in the tub with her like he’s the one doing her a favor. He’s gray almost everywhere: the stubble on his face, around his temples, even the chest hair he hasn’t waxed in years. Britta likes it, though, thinks it makes him look even more annoyingly handsome. One time, at a CVS in Georgia, Britta finished picking up pretzels and toothpaste and found Jeff in front of the display of men’s hair dye. She made fun of him the entire way to Louisiana before telling him that she liked him the way he was.

They’ve been to all fifty states. They parked the RV outside of Los Angeles and flew to Hawaii for a week, helicoptering over volcanoes and feeling uncomfortable in a rental car. They spent a summer driving through Central America, all the way to Panama. “Patagonia,” Britta had said. “We can do it.” They didn’t, but only because Annie was getting married and they went home instead. They spent half a year in Europe, taking the Eurorail from one city to another, from one country to another.

Britta’s favorite thing has always been showing Jeff things and places she’d already seen. His face the first time he saw New York, the moment the plane touched down in London, his feet in the Atlantic. Those were moments where she maybe loved him most, when he turned around and looked back at her, with that look she’ll never in her life be able to describe.

The group buys them a set of wooden rocking chairs as a housewarming present. Britta thinks maybe it’s a joke, maybe a _ha ha, you’re two old people now who are going to sit on the back porch the rest of your life_. But they do it anyway; after years and years in motion Britta’s bones still hum with rhythm of the road and when she and Jeff spend their evenings on the porch she rocks back and forth.

“What do you think?” Jeff asks.

Britta shrugs and tightens her grip on the mug of tea in her hand. “It’s good,” she says, fighting a smile.

“Yeah,” he agrees. He pushes his chair forward and lets it fall back and the sound makes a repetitive _clumpCLUMP_ against the porch floor.

She thinks sometimes, what it would have been like, had she told him no and sent him by himself. Maybe he would have been gone for only a year. Maybe he never would have come back. Sometimes she thinks about if she had said no and they’d both stayed, kept their jobs, had a couple of kids. She wonders if they’d still be together, if she’d still wake up in the morning to find him in the kitchen pouring soy milk into two cups of coffee.

“It’s good,” he echoes. It’s like he’s worried that she has regrets or she resents him. She’s not entirely sure how to tell him that there isn’t a single thing she’d change; he gave her something she’d never have if it wasn’t for him and she doesn’t ache with the absence of the lives she could have lived.

She reaches over and taps the hand that rests on his armrest, once, twice. He smiles and looks out at the backyard. It’s a good life.

 

 

“Hey,” Jeff says. “Come here.”

Britta slips off her shoes and follows him into the water. He’s shin-deep in the Pacific, his jeans pushed up to his knees. He looks absolutely ridiculous but there’s something in his face as he turns to face her and she can’t help but comply.

The water’s up to her thighs by the time she’s standing next to him. It’s cold, but it feels good against the fading humidity. In front of them, the sun is sinking, glaring off the water, and Oregon and the entirety of America is behind them.

“So, this is the ocean,” Britta says dumbly.

Jeff laughs and before she knows it, his arm is slung around her waist, pushing her down into the water. She yelps and thrashes and when she breaks back to the surface he’s still laughing, a mischievous and boyish laugh.

“You ass!” She tugs on his arm and he must not try very hard to stay standing; soon they’re both beneath the water, salt stinging her eyes, pushing and shoving and laughing and people are starting to stare but that’s okay.

He chases her back up the shore and tackles her in the sand. This is all still new, this freedom between them, this not caring what people think. She feels like she’s somebody else when he dips his head down to kiss her. Sand sticks to her wet clothes and chafes the backs of her legs. But she pulls him closer and it’s a scene from someone else’s life, someone who isn’t Britta Perry: making out with her boyfriend on the beach.

“Thank you,” he says into her neck. “Thank you.”


End file.
